The Other Don Kelly

This is the thirteenth (and last) in a series of posts about our bicycling trip from Jasper to Canmore, via the Icefields and Bow Valley Parkways, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

We stayed at the hostel again for our last night in Canmore. By this time I felt like an old hand, a hostel regular… In the morning we packed up and, since the driveway was under construction (thus inaccessible to taxis), we got a lift down the hill in the little hostel vehicle, or at least our bags did.

At the bottom of the hill we found that no taxis were available anyway, but we got a lift from yet another kind stranger with a pickup truck. Our benefactor dropped us off at the bike shop, where our bikes had been boxed and where they let us stash our bags for a few hours while we waited for the shuttle. We got one last walk around town before we left.

The bike store owner got us to the shuttle stop, the shuttle got us to the Calgary Airport, and the hotel shuttle (barely) got us to the hotel — barely, because their big vehicle was in for service, and we could hardly fit with all our stuff into the minivan they showed up with.

The hotel was busy, because everything was busy with the Calgary Stampede in town (it’s the biggest rodeo in North America), but even so, it was an airport hotel in the middle of nowhere, and there wasn’t much going on. A short walk to a nearby brewpub, and an early night, and an early morning flight for me (Anne’s flight would be the following day). Once again, the flight had some difficulties and delays, but the bike and I both made it to JFK in one piece.

Julie picked me up from the airport, and let me know about the cell phone lot where she’d waited for my flight to arrive. This came in handy the next day, when I drove to JFK and picked Anne up…

…and then we were home. We took a few days to rebuild the bikes, clean and stow our gear, and get rid of those bike boxes, but now it’s in the past. All in all, this was one of the best trips we’ve ever done, “ten out of ten, would do again,” in a heartbeat. I really enjoyed reminiscing, I hope you all enjoyed following along!

This is the twelfth in a series of posts about our bicycling trip from Jasper to Canmore, via the Icefields and Bow Valley Parkways, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

Friday: A Goodbye To Julie

Canmore was the end of the line for our bike tour. Anne and I had plans to stay a few days in town, but Julie would be heading home. We all stayed that first/last night at the Alpine Club hostel, which was beautiful, and which we (Anne and I) would return to later in the week. Some photos I took while I was drinking my morning coffee:

That first photo is a shot of the iconic Three Sisters, and I’m pretty sure that’s Mount Rundle on the right in the second shot.

Unfortunately, this was the end of our travel fellowship — Julie would be taking the shuttle from Canmore to Calgary, where she would catch her flight back home. Here she is with her bike boxed up and her bag packed, waiting for her ride to the shuttle pickup:

Julie had to make her way (with all her stuff) from the bike shop to the shuttle pickup a mile away, but luckily Lyle (our Warm Showers host) had a pickup truck and offered to give her a lift, even though they weren’t expecting to have to host us until around 5:00. This was our first contact with Lyle, and the first but not the last time we got to experience his decency and hospitality.

We would be staying for the next several days in Lyle and Kirsten’s home. Our plan was to arrive sometime early evening so we wouldn’t be in their hair all day, and so Anne and I did some more shopping and explored the town.

We arrived at their home just around dinnertime, and found that they gave us their entire upstairs to use — it was almost a suite, complete with an incredible shower in the bathroom, almost like a cross between a rainforest and a steam bath. They made an incredible dinner, and we all hung out and got acquainted, chatting and comparing notes about biking and other sports, family, and former jobs (we were all retired). They were a very interesting couple. Lyle had been an engineer, but I think he played the game at a higher level than I did, and he’d had postings all over the world. They’d lived in Scotland, Germany, and Vietnam as well as Calgary. He was also a car enthusiast, and something of a gadgeteer, especially when it came to cooking: espresso machine, grill and smoker, sous vide cooker…

Saturday: The Hike

We woke up on Saturday, looking for something to do for the day, and our hosts suggested a hike. They had one particular hike in mind, one they liked but the trailhead was not nearby, so they offered use of their car to get there — their Porsche SUV. (They really did treat us like royalty.) Driving a Porsche sounds like fun, but I was terrified of damaging it, and the road to the trailhead turned out to be a twisty, unpaved mountain road, complete with mountain goats wandering around and licking up salt from the road…

Well we made it to the trailhead without incident and started up the hill, though we weren’t 100% sure we were on the trail a lot of the time. I didn’t have my GPS and we had no topo map; all we had to show is the way was a guidebook page on my phone that I’d photographed earlier. The trail, or what we supposed was the trail, was more rugged than we expected, so we turned around before reaching the top. Oh well, but what we did of the hike was well worth it.

For those following along at home, the trail we attempted was the Three Sisters Pass Trail. Some photos:

Two Rides (Sunday and Monday)

Anne and I had rented high end, full suspension mountain bikes in town, and once again our hosts hooked us up, this time showing us around the excellent riding near Canmore. The first day we rode from town, and did some trails called Horseshoe and G8, if I heard Lyle correctly.

Anne had mechanical difficulties with her seatpost and went back to the rental place, and Kirsten was dealing with some wrist issues and had to bail, so for a good chunk it was just me and Lyle. We had a lot of fun, but it was all I could do to hold on to the pace — he was fast.

Eventually we looped around, and Anne caught up with us, and we rode a bit more before her cursed rental bike had more troubles. At that point we just rode down the hill to a microbrewery where we met Kirsten. We hung out there for quite a while, and it was cool to see the place fill up with mountain bikers as time went on.

Our second ride took us back out to where we hiked, and we did a point-to-point ride, complete with shuttles, on a section of the High Rocky Trail. We were joined by Lyle’s friend Dave, another strong rider, who also loaned Anne his wife’s bike.

This was a great ride on some twisty, rolling singletrack, very different terrain and soil from back home but still reminiscent of places like Raystown. (Lyle told me that the trails had been made by machine, which would be a lot like Raystown). Dave was, if anything, even faster, and we all had a merry chase up and down the trail, occasionally yodeling and shouting to warn the bears off. This trail sort of paralleled the dirt road, which was next to a long thin lake, and every so often we came to a clearing with incredible views.

On the way back to town we stopped at the Canmore Nordic Centre, where Lyle and Kirsten showed us around. The Nordic Centre is a provincial park in its own right, with mountain bike trails all through the woods, but it’s also their Olympic-level winter sports arena, the one that was built for Calgary ’88. (Lyle and Kirsten, and their kids, are all very athletic, and Lyle is an official in the Canadian national governing body for biathlon, a sort of mix of XC-skiing and shooting.) You could tell they really loved their town, with its bike trails and all its awesome facilities and amenities, and it was a pleasure to have them show it all to us.

We came back to town and cleaned up, and then we all went out for pizza. This was our goodbye dinner with our hosts: we would be relocating back to the hostel for our last night in town. Moving on was a little sad, and they even offered to let us stay that one last night but we’d taken up enough of their time and hospitality, and we knew they had to get back to living their own lives.

Our vacation wasn’t quite over, but it was starting to wind down.

This is the eleventh in a series of posts about our bicycling trip from Jasper to Canmore, via the Icefields and Bow Valley Parkways, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

This was the day we left the parks and the parkways behind, and our final ride day together. We traveled down the Banff Heritage Trail, a bike path alongside the Trans-Canada Highway between the towns of Banff and Canmore…

The bike path was pretty mellow, just a roll down the hill to the next town, and the vibe was a lot like any local rail-trail, with plenty of people doing what looked like their regular exercise and recreational, out-and-back rides. We were back in the real world, except that we were still surrounded by mountains and beautiful scenery, and wildlife was still a thing — Anne even saw a gray wolf at one point. Luckily it was on the other side of the Trans-Canada Highway’s wildlife protection fence, until we went a bit further and passed through a gate, back into the hungry wilderness… But it was a short ride for all that, and before we knew it we reached our final destination.

Canmore

Canmore had been a coal mining town until 1979 when the mines closed, and reconfigured itself for outdoor sports just in time to be a part of the 1982 Winter Olympics in Calgary — and that’s what put it on the map. It’s a beautiful town, just outside the national park and a tourist destination in its own right — mountain biking in summer, XC skiing in winter — but more charming and less crowded than the towns of Banff and Lake Louise. There was a considerable residential area, and a “real town” shopping district with supermarkets, hardware stores and so on, besides the more touristy “restaurant row,” which was closed to auto traffic and full of outdoor dining, souvenir stands and bike shops. Julie had an appointment at one of them (Outside Bikes) to drop her bike off for packing, and while we were there we got a recommendation for lunch/dinner at their go-to, a brewpub just around the corner. House-smoked brisket sandwiches and cold brews — delicious! After lunch we made our way to the Alpine Club Hostel, our lodging for the night. That was pretty much all she wrote for me, though I think Anne and Julie stayed up a bit later.

Anyway, here are some shots from the day’s ride, and one photo I took from the porch of our hostel:

This is the eleventh in a series of posts about our bicycling trip from Jasper to Canmore, via the Icefields and Bow Valley Parkways, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

This would be our longest ride day. We would go just about 40 miles (luckily, they were easy miles) on the Bow Valley Parkway, from the hostel in Lake Louise to our campsite just outside Banff.

The Bow Valley Parkway was very pretty, as pretty as the Icefields Parkway, and it was obvious we were coming into more temperate ecosystems — the plants were a little more like home, and a bit thicker on the ground too. The ride was mostly uneventful, but we did have to stop to let a young bear cross the road at one point. We rode on, stopping at scenic places with names like Morant’s Curve, Castle Mountain, Moose Meadows, and Vermilion Lakes…

Banff, the town itself, was considerably less idyllic and more hectic than the ride there. We stopped at the first place we saw (mistake), a Tim Horton’s (big mistake), and when we parked the bikes I saw a woman painting her be-stickered and graffiti-covered car with a paintbrush and gray house paint. I said hello (huge mistake) and she bombarded me with a torrent of pressured speech about the car and bad decisions, etc; we retreated into the Tim Horton’s, but it was a mob scene so we hopped back on our bikes and rode straight to our campsite, another mile or so up the road.

This was Tunnel Mountain Village I, and it was awesome: a really big place but spacious and comfortable, with running water and showers and beautiful views everywhere. We showered, ate, took a walk around our new neighborhood, and fell back into our tents.

This is the ninth in a series of posts about our bicycling trip down the Icefield Parkway, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

We ate and packed up, and then we said goodbye to Mosquito Creek and our benefactor Tim. I got one last photo before we took off:

Our route continued downhill, from Mosquito Creek to the iconic mountain town of Lake Louise. This was our second-shortest ride day and probably our easiest, and the day we said goodbye to the Icefields Parkway.

The day’s weather was pretty variable: sunny one moment and raining the next, but this was a pleasant ride, and it was over too soon. We came to the end of the Icefields Parkway, passing the huge line of cars lined up to get into the park and eventually coming to the end of our road. At this point we had to get on the Trans-Canada Highway — the main road through Canada, and basically the equivalent of an Interstate — and ride the shoulder through a tunnel to take the Lake Louise exit. We made it!

Our lodgings were at the Lake Louise Hostel, which was modern, very nice, and similar to the one in Jasper except that it also had a really good restaurant. We were a bit early and couldn’t check in yet, but we were able to drop our stuff off, then we grabbed lunch at a nearby restaurant and did some necessary shopping before checking in. Some photos of our first views of town — I took these at a picnic area behind the town shopping center, which was pretty much the whole town except for a few hotels:

Anne and I opted for showers and a nap, while Julie rode up to the actual lake. The weather continued to deteriorate…

We got up, then got a hi-top table at the hostel’s restaurant — the equivalent of their bar, and the only spot we could get without a reservation. We got a beer and ordered some shared plates. We were into our second beer and wondering if we should send out the Mounties to go find Julie when we saw her come into the hostel, looking like a drowned rat. She went to shower and change, then met us at our table. We ordered dinner, hi-top or no, and heard her tale: it seems the ride from town to the actual lake is up a steep, curvy mountain road, and when she got there it was a tourist madhouse — she estimated 10,000-15,000 people in all. The it started to rain in earnest and all the other tourists started to leave, and she decided that she would take a bus back to town, the tiny road just wasn’t safe with all those people and the rain. She got on the bus line with the thousands who were doing the same, befriended her neighbors in line and got to know them, found out that she needed money for the bus so her new friends gave her the $2.00 fare, and eventually she got down the mountain and here she was! We drank a toast to her Canadian benefactors.

This is the eigth in a series of posts about our bicycling trip down the Icefield Parkway, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

We were getting pretty good with our routine by this point: we got up, ate, packed our stuff, and once again hit the road. Today would be the climb over Bow Pass, the last major climb of our trip.

Bow Pass, while not as difficult as Sunwapta Pass, is actually the highest point on the Parkway — and when we got to the top, we made a right and climbed some more, to the parking lot at Bow Summit. From there we hiked to the Peyto Lake Overlook.

Peyto Lake

This took us completely by surprise — we had no idea what we were hiking up to, except that there would probably be some kind of vista at the top. And there was a vista all right, probably one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen (so far — our trip wasn’t over), so amazing it didn’t even seem real.

I got a few other photos:

I even took some video, hoping that it would do the scene more justice, but even that didn’t quite capture it:

Bow Lake

We continued on, downhill to our next stop: The Lodge At Bow Lake. This was listed in our guides as Num-Ti-Jah Lodge, but apparently that name was less than appropriate so they’d renamed it. They also were closed for renovations, but there was an outdoor dining area, and the kitchen/cafe was still open, so we came in and bought literally everything they had for sale. Sweet potato curry soup, sausage rolls (and a bunch more for later), potato chips and brownies (ditto), and coffee. We got our goodies and sat down to enjoy the view. Anne and I also took a walk while Julie finished her lunch.

Apparently the lodge cafe was open because they did an open-mic session on Sunday afternoon, but we’d missed it. Some guy came in and asked us if the guitar player had come and gone, and we replied that we hadn’t seen anything so we expected that it was all over for the day. Remember this guy…

Mosquito Creek Hostel

Our final stop for the day was just a little further down the hill. We got back on the road, stopping one last time to check out Crowfoot Glacier, which we’d heard about from our friends back at Waterfowl Lake.

And so on down the hill… Our plan was to stay at Mosquito Creek Campground, but the weather was starting to get nasty, and Julie was feeling the effects of our earlier elevation adventure, so we decided to try getting some bunks at the Mosquito Creek Hostel next door. We pulled in early, maybe an hour before they opened, and eventually found the manager. Remember that guy from the lodge? It was him, and he told us “actually we’re full, but come on in to the main room and stick around, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Well, it turns out that Tim the manager was an actual diplomat and environmental lawyer in a previous existence; he put forth some serious diplomacy, wheeling and dealing among the other guests, and eventually found space for us as well as some other unexpected late arrivals. Sweet!

Mosquito Creek was pretty nice, and we hit it off with the other guests around the dinner tables, in the sauna — the sauna! — and in the big common room. Anne especially bonded with Tim over their history as lawyers, and commiserating with him over the nasty bureaucratic infighting that led to the end of his career. (He was a decent guy, and it sounded like he found himself swimming with sharks.) Anyway, he still had all his skills, and he used them to do us a solid.

Unfortunately, Mosquito Creek was where I felt the first tinges of what became an allergy-sinus-ear issue, which lasted the rest of the trip and became a full-blown ear infection after our return. I’d been exposed to the wood burning sauna and the wood stove (particulates), and we were now coming down out of the icefields and into the local early spring (clouds of tree pollen), and my allergy bucket must have overflowed.

This is the seventh in a series of posts about our bicycling trip down the Icefield Parkway, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

Just another day in a Northern mountain paradise… We traveled down to the North Saskatchewan River crossing, stopping for lunch at the hotel/restaurant there, and then climbed back up from the river to our next campsite.

This was a really pleasant day of riding, and we got to see a bit of mountain drama as the snow heated up in the sun, and on the distant slopes we saw what looked like waterfalls being blown around by the wind… Avalanches! As we got closer, the roadside trees blocked our view of the mountains, but we could hear an occasional rumbling as the snow let loose. These were Mount Chephren (which looked like the Matterhorn) and White Pyramid Mountain, and we got close up views one last time before we got to Waterfowl Lake.

When we got to the campground we found that our ranger friend had been true to her word: there was a walk-in site reserved for Julie, and it was beautiful. (We wanted to thank her, but we never saw her again.) We set up camp and took a walk, and-we bumped into some of our campsite neighbors who were about to do some lake photography and invited us along.

Paul and Gord were both experienced mountaineers and guides, and had tons of funny, interesting stories about hiking and climbing in the Icefields. We learned a lot about that world, and really enjoyed our time with them while Paul (the photographer) waited for the perfect lake shots. I just took the photos that came my way…

This is the sixth in a series of posts about our bicycling trip down the Icefield Parkway, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

Our morning at the campground was pretty uneventful: we just packed up and got ourselves ready, and then rode the mile or so back to the Icefields Visitor Centre — I wasn’t kidding about the quality of food there! We ate there again, and stocked up on sandwiches for dinner.

This was our one real “white-knuckle ride,” as we came down from Sunwapta Pass to the valley of the North Saskatchewan. It really wasn’t too crazy, but it was steep enough to be intimidating, steep enough that we had to ride our brakes all the way down, and long enough that we had to stop several times to let our brakes cool. (We could actually smell our brakes, and the brakes of the cars going by, overheating.) Luckily, once again there were pull-offs and lookouts we could use to catch a break. The shoulder was pretty ample too, though there was one spot where a camper-van going the opposite direction broke down — it was parked mostly on the opposite shoulder, but stuck out into traffic, and the driver was under the van with his legs even further into traffic… The guy had safety cones out, but this was also Canada Day and the road was super busy, and with the northbound cars going around him and the southbound cars moving over and encroaching on our shoulder, things got pretty tight for a hot minute.

We finally got down the steep part to the “big bend,” where the road doubles back in a series of 90 and 180 degree turns, and where we stopped to explore a beautiful stream that turned out to be the North Saskatchewan River. We weren’t done or even all the way down, but the craziest part of our day was over.

When we got to the Rampart Creek Campground, there was a ranger in her truck at the entrance, who took one look at me and exclaimed “You look warm!” (I was pretty sunburned.) She gave us advice for the best remaining walk-in campsites, and we found the spots and set up camp in a sudden, and thankfully very short, hailstorm. We took opportunities to wash bodies and clothes in Rampart Creek, which was just a short hike down the trail from our site, then we ate our dinner and just enjoyed the scenery. (The plants and soil surface reminded me very much of Snowshoe, West Virginia, by the way, the same pines and soft, lumpy peat moss. The mountains were a bit bigger here…)

The ranger eventually stopped back and talked with us, asking about our trip so far and reminiscing about when she cycled across Canada as a young woman. She also said she’d make sure we would have a campsite available at the next campground — sweet!